Deaths in the Workhouse

[tony vines]

I thought that there was a thread on workhouses but apparently not so I hope that the moderators will kindly move this if the thread topic is inappropriate.

I have a relative who was in what appears to have been the Wellingborough Workhouse at the time of the 1901 census. His wife and family however were living outside in a nearby village which is curious in itself if you think about it. But that's not my question.

My relative was previously a boot and shoe machinist but in the workhouse census he is shown as being epileptic. My guess is that his illness had caused him to lose his job and he had therefore lost all means of supporting his family.

However, after much diligent research I've not been able to find any record of his death and as a result I have no idea whether he died there or whether he managed to get out again. My question therefore is whether there was a different form of record keeping if someone died while in the workhouse. I assume that he would be regarded as a pauper and I am vaguely aware of the phrase "pauper's grave" but am not sure if this is significant.

Does anyone know whether records of deaths in the workhouse are held other than in the normal GRO records?

[Mona]

workhouses.org.uk

Check this site, it is excellent. Click on English Poor Law unions to find the county you are interested in.
He was probably in the workhouse hospital.

[Mutley]

I thought that there was a thread on workhouses but apparently not so I hope that the moderators will kindly move this if the thread topic is inappropriate.

Does anyone know whether records of deaths in the workhouse are held other than in the normal GRO records?

I'll move it to Institutions for you. That is where most of the workhouse questions seem to be.:)

I have a workhouse and a hospital death, both certificates were in the normal GRO records.

[JohnN]

I have a relative who was in what appears to have been the Wellingborough Workhouse at the time of the 1901 census. His wife and family however were living outside in a nearby village which is curious in itself if you think about it. But that's not my question.




Was this arrangement so curious, Tony?

Myggggrandfather, Thomas Clift, shows up in the 1881 Census as an inmate of Stockbridge Workhouse, shown as a widower, born Stockbridge. He was actually born at Broughton and his wife Martha was still alive and kicking and shown as head of the household, still employed as a 'Field Worker' at the age of 73.

I suspect the poor old chap had lost his marbles and had been put away for his own good.

Cheers

John
.._

[Peter Goodey]

Workhouse deaths were recorded in the usual way. You may want to consider the possibility that he was transferred to the County Asylum which would have been in a different registration district.

[tony vines]

Thanks everyone and particularly Peter for confirming that inmates' deaths are recorded in the same way as everyone else's. I have checked the death records for every registration district in the county of Northamptonshire and indeed Rutland and Leicestershire too but his death is not recorded. There is an astonishingly large number of male members of this particular family who disappear from both census records and GRO records.

[Mavis T Vines]

Hi Tony, as we both know we now have a lot more of this story, but maybe other forum readers may be interested in what we managed to find out by checking records in Northampton. This was my g grandfather, and after being in the workhouse, he was moved to Northampton Asylum as a chronically ill patient. As the hospitals were being emptied to accommodate gassed and wounded soldiers in the first world war, he was transferred to Nottingham County Asylum, where he eventually died of TB. He was institutionalised for 17 years altogether, apparently because he was epileptic initially. But because he was recorded as having had as many as five fits a night, and falling out of bed etc, he was a very sad, battered, bruised and confused man at the end. He was recorded as sometimes being very aggressive, sometimes being beat up by both staff and other patients , and was often tied to his bed or put in a padded room. All in all he had a troubled life, from losing his mother at 6 years old, then getting a stepmother, he became a petty criminal from 12 years old, stealing mostly food, so who knows what dire straits he found himself in? We are still finding out more and more about his life.

[Mutley]

Hello Mavis,

A very sad tale indeed. I doubt though, that it is the end of the tale as you are willing to go on and find out more about his life.
That is the best gift you can give him, that he be remembered. ;)

Thank you for keeping in touch.|hug|

[tony vines]

As Peter predicted and Mavis now confirms, he was indeed transferred to the local asylum and treated pretty badly while there. From Mavis's more recent research it is not clear whether he was sent there because of his epilepsy or because of other issues. However, it is clear that in the C19th and even into C20th so little was known about epilepsy that it was lumped into the many categories of mental illness that were deemed best suited to life in an institution.

It is yet another thing that shows how the human race makes progress in understanding over the decades and it makes you wonder how things will be in another 100 years. No doubt, how we deal with all kinds of physical and mental illness today will be seen as barbaric in 2109.

[marianne Faull]

He could have just been sick and in the infirmary, as was the case of my 2 X G-grandfather, the family lived together but they were poor & when he became sick he went into the workhouse infirmary, where he died.

[Peter Goodey]

So what further records did you find, Tony? This information might help others with similar problems.

[MythicalMarian]

Mavis and Tony - what a heartbreaking tale. But you must go on and see what else you can find about him, as Mutley says - you can at least then give him the love and sympathy he must have lacked in his own time. |hug|

Sometimes, this hobby of ours leads to some dreadful discoveries and confrontations with the lamentable lack of understanding and compassion in our countrymen of yesteryear.

[tony vines]

Peter

As you can see from this thread even the more recent research has taken several months to unravel. From the 1911 census I eventually found a reference to him named as Henry Vine i.e. with the final 's' omitted in a Northampton asylum. I then found a death record for Henry Vine in Notts. which didn't sound too promising. However, Mavis then obtained the death certificate which proved fairly conclusively that he was the ancestor we were researching.

This gave Mavis the confidence to go to Northampton from Yorkshire to see what other records were available, particularly from the local asylum. Mavis can be more specific about what exactly she looked up and how she was able to find them, so I will leave her to tell you about her work. Suffice it to say she unearthed all the information about his treatment in the asylum, that is to say, of the non-medical kind.

[tony vines]

Hi Marianne

Thanks for the thought and indeed he did die of consumption in 1917, but not in the workhouse. Sometime between 1901 and 1911 he was transfered to the local asylum and then during the first world war, in order to make way for gassed soldiers back from the trenches, he was transfered to another asylum in a different county. He died there. Consumption was pretty common in society generally as I'm sure you know but being confined in an institution obviously increased the chances of catching this contageous and infectious disease.

On a lighter note. His wife took a lodger while he was "inside" and promptly married him when her husband died. At least she had the decency to make it "legal"! Ironically the surname of her lodger/new husband was Vine. Her husband's name was Vines although he had been admitted to the two asylums mistakenly as Vine. I am pretty sure that there was no family connection however. She obviously liked her surname enough to want to keep it, or something like it!:)

[Mavis T Vines]

Tony Vines has been asked to elaborate on how we got so much info about my ggrandfather, in order to help others if they are struggling. As I got the info he passed it on to me to explain how I got there.

Firstly it was a joint effort. I realised on "meeting" Tony on another site, that we both subscribed, but to different geneolgy sites, and we soon fell into sharing any info we found, along with another cousin. We knew Henry J Vines was in the workhouse as an epileptic from the census records. But then lost track of him. Tony found a marriage of Henry's wife to her lodger (also noted in the Census, and interestingly enough also named Vine). He let me know, so we worked backwards through deaths, and found a Henry J Vine which fitted in with the dates, but the location was a mystery. However I decided the only way to find out was to buy the death certificate. As it was my g grandfather I took the lead, and found to my great delight, we had found the right man. I then decided to go to Northampton Records Office, I got there early one morning, intent on using the whole day if necessary to track down some information. I then asked for dates of admittance and releases from the workhouse starting at the census date of 1901.

I spent a lot of time reading them all but found only that his son (My great uncle Thomas noted as feeble minded in an earlier census) was also in the workhouse. The archivist suggested we look at the "chronic" book, which I presumed meant chronically ill, and there we found the whole sad story, about his confused state. It was a complete diary of his bruised and battered state, his behaviour, his physical appearance. It recorded how many fits he had through the night, how many times he fell on the floor, how they had to tie him up as he was sometimes aggresssive, sometimes confused, and sometimes he thought he was in the army, although we have no records of him ever being in the forces. Somtimes they put him in a padded room and there was even a photograph of him. There was never a suggestion that he was insane, it was the result of the severe epilepsy he had, and the many injuries he received. He had many black eyes, scars on his head, a dislocated shoulder at one stage even.

Anyway I did find from the records the date when he was transferred to Nottingham Asylum. I asked the archivist why would he have been transferred from one asylum to the other, and he said that Northampton Asylum was being cleared at that time to make way for gassed and injured soldiers from the 1st world war.

The archivist is able to get his medical records for me, which I intend to do as soon as I have saved up enough money, and we can then get to the end of his story, and maybe find where he was buried.

I could not have done this without help from Tony Vines, he has always been very generous in sharing his information with me, so it is worth working together to find the stories behind your familes, an d do go the the records offices if you need to, as they are a mine iof information.

Hope this helps someone to go a bit further in their research. My own grandfather (Henry J's son)was lost in the River Thames at 29 years old, so was never able to tell about his family, so it has been a revelation to find all this info about our lost family in the Northamptonshire area.!